Guiding young people

11.

If you’ve examined a school canteen lately, you’ll see an absence of the very worst foods including fatty meat dishes and sugary drinks and confections. Sometimes salads appear on the menu, but still, animal foods make a strong showing whilst substantial plant-based dishes are rarely on offer; although in fairness a vegan meal can be ordered in advance at most school canteens. The way young people are introduced to food outside the home is a long way from proactive encouragement of healthy eating let alone avoiding cruelty-foods. Students deserve to be taught about the health-giving qualities of non-animal food, but those who are supposed to be food guides (the consultant nutritionists) are not willing to speak out against animal foods for fear of causing offence, losing professional credibility or even losing their funding from animal-industry sources. Meat dishes are known, are popular and are the default because their ingredients are so readily available and volunteer canteen staff  may only know how to prepare meat-based meals. I imagine few would be familiar with making attractive, main course, vegan dishes.

The nutritionists and the teachers themselves allow students to remain unenlightened. Ideally school teachers (whom students already trust) could be teaching useful facts about plant-based foods and farm-animal life; but presently most of them know little about either nutrition or animal husbandry and eat meat themselves. They are hardly in a position to be impartial or encourage students to examine animal foods too closely. Therefore it’s down to those who have a ‘clean slate’ and the necessary information to guide children in nutrition and the truth about animal farming. But many of us are not teachers or don’t have access to young people.  So until there are enough school teachers who are at least practising and well informed vegans, children are unlikely to find out what they need to know until they are old enough to discover things for themselves. By then, too many bad habits are likely to be entrenched. For children and adults alike, there’s so much ground to cover and so much to learn. Being addicted, or at least craving certain foods, doesn’t help. Poor food habits hold most people back from contemplating the possibility of an ethically-based diet change. And apart from the animal population suffering the young people are suffering for lack of responsible guidance.

Pitching to the grown ups

10.

This movement aims to grant animals the right to their own unenslaved lives. It is still a young movement, in the process of formation. It is peopled by passionate and good-hearted activists, who no longer use animals. These people advocate on behalf of the voiceless, and gradually find out (to their horror) what they are up against.

The Movement has made some considerable impact in USA and parts of Europe, but to date it has had less impact in Australia. I like to think we are a more discerning race of people (in this case to our detriment) with greater suspicion of being told what to do and what we should eat. I like to think that you can’t win over Australians with a few slick fundamentalist arguments. We, as a people, are savvy enough to know this is a much bigger matter, a more far-reaching problem than first meets the eye. It involves eating habits, clothing, empathy for animals and the health of the planet. As Australian animal advocates, we might need a more sophisticated approach than our colleagues overseas. It isn’t enough that we merely encourage vegan diets. We have to show our hand more completely, to help people see animals in a different light. We need to encourage them to use their imaginations in order to feel how deeply animals may be suffering and how we humans are suffering too because of the way we treat them.

It’s tricky for the persuading advocate – too much finger wagging and people turn off, too soft a voice and we’re ignored. But it’s not our job to tell intelligent and self-willed people what they should be eating or using. We should encourage them to investigate and become their own judge and jury. Independent adults must be allowed to decide for themselves. Young people too must be given the chance to understand what is going on. 

Children recruited into animal cruelty

9.

Those of us who don’t subscribe to the economic rationale, who think using animals is wrong, also realise that animal protein is unnecessary and indeed harmful to humans. We also see it as a tragedy for both animals and young people. Both are powerless victims in this dangerous game. Kids can’t fend for themselves. They must do as they’re told and eat what they’re given. Misinformed and kept generally uninformed, they inevitably become believers in the necessity of farming animals for food. They grow up never being told how their food comes to them because everything that happens to farm animals is kept secret from them. These days no one, adults and kids alike, is allowed to visit intensive animal farms or abattoirs; so no one ever sees for themselves what happens there.  If we, as a society, weren’t ashamed of our treatment of farm animals, we’d allow and encourage school students to see for themselves every stage of the processing of animals for food. Children would be taken to factory farms and processing plants and shown how meat, milk and eggs are produced … putting them in a position to decide for themselves whether they should use the produce of these animals. But since this would seriously affect the fortunes of the animal-food market, it doesn’t happen! 

The economic rationale behind animal cruelty

8.

In this present day society, we are guided less by ethics and more by economics. From a need for food-energy comes the idea that high-energy-food comes from animals. This logic says that energy production has to be economically viable. Therefore it must be okay for ‘food’ animals to be held captive for their whole life and kept virtually immobilized to maximize energy. The poultry sheds and cattle feedlots are testament to that logic in that they depend on restricting the animal’s bodily movements to make their fattening more efficient. Nothing else makes economic sense. The typical intensive system must go unremarked if we want cheap meat, cheap eggs and cheap milk! There must be tacit public approval for treating animals in this ‘necessarily atrocious’ way. 

Be normal: eat animals

7.

It is an irrefutable fact, that ‘almost’ every human on the planet eats meat and uses animal products! The idea that animals may be used for food, is universally accepted. This Goliath seems unconquerable … and yet the idea of Animal Rights has reached a considerable number of people. They’ve decided for themselves that they’ll no longer be party to animal exploitation. A recent survey by the Vegetarian Resources Group in USA, shows 1% are practicing vegans and so it seems that, against all odds, the ‘Rights’ movement is gaining ground. But to reach the majority who are less sensitive, less empathetic or more animal-food addicted, we might need to re-examine how we approach the majority of practicing omnivores. They may take a lot of convincing and we, as animal advocates, will have to combine all our talents to make a sufficiently large impact.

Many people are not necessarily in full control of their own actions since their minds have been bent so heavily towards the need to comply with majority behaviour. More than anything, people want to be seen as ‘normal’. They certainly don’t want to stand out as being fussy about food, food-wowsers, or weird in any way. To underline their ‘regular guy’ status, perhaps they must believe that what is normal must be ethically okay, otherwise people would reject it. From that belief stems a blind acceptance of a few dangerous premises: firstly in the belief that animals bred for food are not like dogs and cats, secondly the belief that since unloved pigs and cows and chickens are brought to life solely for the use of humans, it is then (by some contorted logic) okay to enslave them, brutally kill them and quickly forget them. Once this is accepted, the rest can be justified - to believe that it’s okay to deny these animals any sort of life of their own, and from there build a case for accepting any level of atrocity, simply by treating them like inanimate objects.

Denial

6.

In their use of animal foods, most people shelter in denial and protect themselves by only-doing-what-others-do. They practise same-behaviour, they turn a blind eye to the suffering of ‘food animals’. In a nutshell, this is the main obstacle facing the liberation of these animals. They shield themselves from hearing what Animal Rightists are saying. Those of us who are advocating rights for animals might try every angle to persuade people to abandon animal-foods. There are so many good arguments to choose from. We might expose the horrors, appeal to people’s sense of compassion, explain in detail why animal by-products involve cruelty, suggest attractive non-animal foods, emphasize the greenhouse implications of animal farming, but we reach relatively few. Most people are unwilling to step so boldly away from convention, especially if it means giving up their favourite foods. At best, they are afraid of the ‘deficiency’ of plant-based diets; at worst, they are in ‘atrocity-denial’ and playing dangerous mind games with themselves.

Maybe they realize the power of what we are saying but just try their best to ignore us. They may be afraid that if a break-through were made (in public acceptance of Animal Rights) it would spell the end of animal farming. That would mean no more meat and none of the thousands of animal-based commodities widely available today. In foreseeing this, people are inclined to vigorously defend their lifestyle and do whatever is necessary to guarantee their favourite food supplies. More importantly, they’ll resist everything we are saying about ‘atrocity’, which is probably why people pre-emptively shy away from discussing anything to do with animals (that are used for food).

The atrocity buffer

5

If hunting with barbed fishing hooks or with guns is a ruthless sport, then animal farming is a cold, calculated and prolonged torture process. Using animals as a main source of food supply has long been shown to be unnecessary, since a plant-based diet is safe, satisfying and very healthy. When that penny eventually drops, one hopes that all intelligent people will say “no more” and start to look more carefully at the Animal Rights arguments and go on to discover a food regime which poses no danger to either health or conscience.

But at the moment, most people haven’t paid too much attention to our arguments. They prefer to eat as others eat, fish as others fish, shop as others shop. Of course, impressionable youngsters think everything is quite normal and acceptable; and we can’t blame them for that.

Over this last half century, since the end of the Second World War, consumption of meat has increased dramatically. It’s cheap, plentiful and animal by-products are widely used in a huge variety of snacks and confections. We’ve become dependent and even addicted to animal-based foods. Greater demand and competition has brought about a creeping deterioration in conditions on animal farms, to the point where intensive farming is now nothing short of an atrocity. When we think of atrocities, we imagine the torture and massacring of people. These horrors, not usually involving us personally, we duly condemn. But this atrocity (the enslaving and executing of food-animals) only differs in so much as almost everyone is involved in it. For example, the life-long caging and brutal killing of chickens is actively supported by anyone who is buying caged hens’ eggs or eating chicken-meat … which is something that most people do. Since no one wants to associate themselves with ‘atrocity’, they try to deny it. They’ll develop an ‘atrocity-buffer’ which allows them to spot any other atrocity except the one they’re connected with.